Tips on website communication

[gnusupport]

I can see that on your website you had hard time dealing with outside discussion and that you don't have a simple way for people to comment. Maybe you could have new thoughts and observations when you let people participate.

One way is to make a simple form for people to comment, we had it on Internet since its inception. I have made a specialized CGI form in Common Lisp and I use it since years.

If your side is programmatically expanded maybe you could create static forms with variables such as the section name or section ID number or page ID number, as that way you could know to what is user commenting, and user could designate it as to be published or to be private comment.

If you have control to make new email aliases, you can also create email address and do the same, and allow people simply use the mailto: links.

Mailto: links can be sophisticated to include the subject and body and here I am giving you one example:

send email

You could create a public email address by recent date such as 2021-05-07@example.com and you could keep that email address on website, if you start receiving spam at any time, you just change it
to something else like 2021-07-01@example.com and keep receiving online feedback.

Additionally if you do impose that email subject must have specific words, any such email without those specific words could be filtered out, as you know:

1. From where the email should come from (from website only);

2. That subject should contain specific keywords;

I can even imagine static type of a forum, where people can respond by email, email subject will keep the ID of the section user answered to, and once it arrives offline it can be parsed into a database, and later expanded into HTML where one could clearly see to which section
or which user's comment was answered. It would require curation, it would not be automatic, but it could be as well automatic.